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Understanding why the gender pay gap persists is a gnarly economic and public policy question with no clear answers. I examine some of the layers of the topic and also examine the findings of a recent study by the Institute for Women's Policy Research.Getty

Making sense of the gender gap and equal pay in the United States can give you a headache. We all want a simple answer for why women still drag behind their male counterparts when it comes to pay, promotion or acquiring wealth. It seems easy to throw out solutions like negotiate better or take leadership classes or have better family benefits. While tactical options are available, the long-term solutions are not that straightforward. For decades, researchers, leaders and organizations have tried to wrap their arms around this complicated topic. The reality is there are no simple answers to this chronic workforce issue. Moreover, much of the historical or statistical analyses miss profound changes that have happened for working women in the last six years.

Some of the explanation for the gender gap is obvious - the negative effect of sexism, racism and other structural factors like access to education or workforce barriers are clear and compound each other. Add to this the individual demands of care-taking, whether for children or for the increasing aging population, and women are faced with a double or triple penalty on their time and attention. It is also just difficult to reduce a complex workforce dynamic into one accurate measure. Attempting to boil down the experience of millions of people and dozens of industries across multiple decades into a few numbers is problematic because so much context and meaning is lost. That approach also misses more nuanced and contradictory dynamics that exist in smaller pockets of women in the workforce.

A recent study released by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research claims that the accurate gender pay gap for the last 15 years in the United States is actually 49%, not the more widely used 80% average that is commonly cited. In other words, for every $1 made by a white male worker, a women would receive $0.49 for their work. This is in stark contrast to the statistics reported by the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Women’s Law Center or the American Association of University Women, which commonly report that the gender pay gap causes women, on average, to be paid $0.80 for every $1 paid to a white man. The gap also varies by race, with black ($0.63) and Native ($0.57) women and Latinas ($0.54) making significantly less than white ($0.82) or Asian ($0.87) women.

The biggest reason for the stark difference in analysis is math. The IWPR report summarizes wage data along the dimension of gender only, which means that women and men of varying industry are all lumped together in their wage ratio. The IWPR analysis also looks at intervals of 15 years, with the first cohort starting with working women in 1968. This is in contrast to wage comparison within a single year, which is how the analysis is more commonly done. But the most problematic piece of the IWPR analysis is it doesn’t properly weigh the massive changes that have happened for women and their earning potential in the last six years. Whether because of education, movements like #MeToo, or a general increase in job mobility because of technology and a tightening labor pool, radical changes have happened very recently for women. Those changes might hold the potential for closing the income gap at a very rapid pace.

I mention six years because that was the first year that women surpassed men in college enrollment. Pew Research reported that in 2012, 71% of women and only 61% of men attended college, with significant advancement by black and hispanic women. This is in very stark contrast to gender enrollment in 1963, where only 38% of women enrolled in higher education, and a vast majority of those women were white and from higher economic strata. Consider that the women who started college in 2012 have only been in the workforce full time for two years at a maximum, which would in no way have a measurable impact on the IWPR findings.

Significant changes are also happening to the labor force because of #MeToo and an increasing and public desire to combat bias and discrimination. Tied to the sexual harassment awareness movement is the knowledge that the status quo on gender cannot be maintained for forward-thinking leaders of industry. Majorcorporations have become vocally supportive of equal pay because it’s both the right thing to do and it’s good for business. Consider the changes that Starbucks solidified this year - a shift towards equal pay that started nearly a decade ago. Or the work that Nike has done to level set salaries, or the 20,000 Google employees that walked out to voice their desire for a more equal workplace. One talent officer in Silicon Valley told me he made sure his company was equal pay certified because it helps him attract top talent of any gender. These are tectonic and significant changes in what employees want and need, and what leading organizations are doing to create a more equal workplace.

The other dynamic that isn’t going to register in the IWPR study is the effect that job searching technology has on mobility in a workforce. Monster Worldwide was one of the first online job searching companies, launching 20 years ago. Other similar companies like Indeed now help more than 200 million people find and hire people around the globe, with a majority of those transactions happening in the United States. Beyond the job market, there has been an explosion of online learning resources tailored towards women that help them build new career pivots or side businesses that simply did not exist six to ten years ago. This is particularly true for women seeking to enter the higher-paying tech industry. Whether in tech or other professional service industries, PayScale found in a recent study that the controlled gender pay gap was only $0.02. The controlled gender pay gap is when women and men at a similar job compare salaries, which is specific to job description and industry. But many of these advances in pay are recent may not have registered with the IWPR analysis.

Not all the findings of the IWPR report are incongruent with other research. In fact, the report reinforced that women incur a higher economic penalty when they take a break from participating in the workforce. The report strongly advocates for policies that support paid family and medical leave and affordable child care available to ease care-taking responsibilities and keep women working. This follows the same suggestions of many other notable organizations and leaders that support solutions and benefits that grant the flexibility that would help women succeed.

Yet even this analysis of the so-called motherhood penalty isn’t without exceptions. Timing of pregnancies have enormous impact on a working mother’s earning potential, a point that is not addressed in the IWPR report. Dr. Elizabeth Gregory at the University of Houston found a correlation to age when she looked at Census data starting in 2000. Her research found that delaying pregnancy until after 35 was associated with an increase of $16,000 in income per year. Dr. Amalia Miller at the University of Virginia also found that “women who bore their first child after age 30 enjoyed higher wage rates and accumulated more wealth by age 60 than earlier child-bearers and childless women,” according to her research from 2005. Yet another study done by the U.S. Census found that for certain industries, delaying pregnancy lead to mothers earning more than non-mothers of the same age. “Mothers earned more than non-mothers when they had children at older ages and they worked in managerial and professional, protective service or sales occupations,” according to their 2015 study. This same effect, however, was not apparent in other industries.

I take the IWPR report for what I see it to be - a history lesson. The analysis is a quantification of generations of women who were kept out of career trajectories that women today are finally gaining access to and leveraging. The world of a working woman in 1968 was radically different than in 1983, and still different than in 1998, when I entered the workforce. Fifteen years later, in 2013, the group of women who had just entered college will face a whole other set of challenges and victories that we can only begin to imagine. It is possible that research, corporate leadership, better policies and technology might all converge in ways that will propel us towards equal pay, well ahead of the currently projected deadline. Statistics and historical analysis of data help us understand the large contours of the experience of an entire population, but understanding the gender gap is a constantly moving target. It's important to remember that statistics have no bearing on an individual’s probability of success.

I help leaders negotiate authentically with emotional intelligence. I am passionate about elevating remarkable stories of collaboration that connect people with their power to do good in the world. I also think that equal pay policies point us to the future of work. Previou...